Excerpts from my book in writing, "A world for everyone": Social polarization

This is a picture I took at the Tel Aviv beach, and when I looked at it, it seemed to me kind of strange.

I like to capture pictures with lots of details and activity in them, and every once in awhile, I use panorama stitching to enhance this effect. Sometimes this may cause a certain person or several people to appear in the picture more than once. This picture from the La Strand hotel in Manhattan, is a good example:

But the picture from the Tel Aviv beach is not a stitch. It’s a single shot. Yet it looks like the same person appears in it several times, doesn't it? Well no. These are several different hipsters.

People often lament nowadays about how polarized our societies became. What they usually mean, is that it looks like there is no common ground anymore, between different political and social groups, and that each group is isolating itself in a fortress of self righteous. While I agree that this process is real, and extremely destructive, I think that it is often looked at in the wrong way. Polarizing is a process in which each group is collapsing towards one of the poles. It is not that we build walls between the groups. It is that each group is losing its own internal diversity, until, like the hipsters in my picture, identity politics becomes possible because it becomes true, or at least too close to be true, that all members of each group seem to be the same.

It wasn't always like that. I remember a time, when people were much more tolerant, even appreciative, to stants that were not that clear cut. When it was possible to say something like, “You know, I am all in for free market economy, and the small government thing, but there are exceptions, like maybe we should still make sure that everyone have medical insurance”, and then, there might have been some disagreement and an argument, maybe someone would argue that plans like “Obamacare”, although they look like a benevolent thing, simply don't work, but it would seldom get to personal accusations, to doubting one another's motives or to calling one another names, like “leftist” or “fascist”.

But today, every political or even more mundane social argument becomes a horror film. It doesn't feel good to anyone, and the result is simply conformism and group thinking that leads to polarization.

If we want our societies and democracies to survive, this process have to stop and reverse. We have to find ways to make people tolerant to a larger variety of opinions. It doesn't matter that people should be less opinionated, quite the contrary. It means that we should encourage and help people to make up their own mind and understand that every opinion counts.